CurtPalme.com Home Theater Forum

WanMan · Joined: 19 Mar 2006 Posts: 10270

Wife and I were in Costco this morning and they've got a special going on the WD MyBook 2TB for $129.99. I wasn't sure if this was considered appealing or not. I wonder if WDC is making room to replace the USB2.0 with the newer USB3.0. Too bad these don't have eSATA. We bought two of them (limit was five).

Sparky015 · Posted: Mon May 17, 2010 5:39 pm Post subject:

not too bad for a Cowsumer Laughing

garyfritz · Joined: 08 Apr 2006 Posts: 12088 Location: Fort Collins, CO

Don't put any irreplaceable data on them. We had 2? 3? .5 - 1.0 TB models, and all died within a year. I was able to recover the data by removing the dead LAN interface and dropping the disk into a desktop system, but...

WanMan · Joined: 19 Mar 2006 Posts: 10270

You know, Gary, I figured I would wait about a week or two for feedback to come in. I figured I was safe getting them from Costco--meaning I could return them anytime. Sucks that these things are not more reliable. Was it just the LAN interface? I believe these only have USB2.0.

BTW, last week I bought the wife this cute HP thumb drive. It measured about 1" long, 3/8" wide and was about 1/8-3/32" thick. It is 8GB. That's 20 times the capacity of the hard drive in her first computer back in 1994-5.

Sparky015 · Posted: Mon May 17, 2010 7:21 pm Post subject:

I've had issues with WD MyBooks and the hard drives as well. I've found that they are good for about a year before they fail. I had two do the same thing before I gave up and switched to a NAS storage system. More expensive, but you get HDD real-time diagnostics and drive health indicators so that you can make the swap before it crashes on you.

WanMan · Joined: 19 Mar 2006 Posts: 10270

I'm not sure how a NAS makes a hard drive manufacturer better at making more reliable hard drives. And its not like you can carry a NAS around with you.

Sparky015 · Posted: Tue May 18, 2010 12:38 pm Post subject:

I don't think I said it makes a HDD manaufactuer better. What I said is that it gives you diagnostics and drive health capability so that you can swap the drive out before that oh sh*t moment when you lose all of your data.

You would be surprised. Have you seen NAS systems lately? They can be quite small, nearly the size of a WD crapbook for a 2-bay NAS.

garyfritz · Joined: 08 Apr 2006 Posts: 12088 Location: Fort Collins, CO

Yes, it was just the LAN/NAS enclosure that died on ours. That's why I was able to extract the disk and recover the data.

At some point we may bite the bullet and get a real NAS with RAID &etc. The LaCie NAS's we had (which also died within about 6 months) used RAID but only to make 2 .5TB drives look like 1 1TB drive -- no redundancy, no data protection. These things keep dying too consistently. We need some RAID1 or at least RAID5 protection so when one disk goes, the data doesn't. (That assumes of course that the NAS enclosure doesn't die -- which is what happened with the WD and LaCie NAS's, hmmm...)

paw · Joined: 08 Mar 2006 Posts: 1176 Location: Arvada, CO

paw · Joined: 08 Mar 2006 Posts: 1176 Location: Arvada, CO

ecrabb · Posted: Wed May 19, 2010 7:46 am Post subject:

garyfritz · Joined: 08 Apr 2006 Posts: 12088 Location: Fort Collins, CO

RAID0. Striped data across multiple disks with no parity or redundancy.

paw · Joined: 08 Mar 2006 Posts: 1176 Location: Arvada, CO

[quote="garyfritz"] make 2 .5TB drives look like 1 1TB drive [quote]

LOL! I read this wrong. Though thought you meant

"make 2.5TB drives look like 1TB drive"

What you really meant was

"make two 0.5TB drives look like one 1TB drive"

So, there was no space lost. I knew RAID0 didn't waste space!

Tom.W · Joined: 09 Mar 2006 Posts: 6635

Not much of a computer or HTPC guy but does this look like a good external back up drive for my sisters birthday ?

http://www.newegg.com/product/product.aspx?Item=N82E16822186159

She wants to back up movies and photos. At this point she has I believe a 250 GB hard drive.